jueves, 8 de septiembre de 2011

The recipee for innovation

One of my favorite hobbies is to take a "deep dive" into the kitchen and came out with a nice dish that smells good, looks nicer and tastes great. That’s why in my bookshelves there is a special place for cooking books.

The books that I happen to buy are usually the bargains in bookstores, this mean that either the books are in English or even worst are in Spanish with ingredients from Spain like gambas, puerros or guindillas -I’m from & live in Baja, Mexico. So with little idea of what are the original ingredients and just with the picture, that makes me being more hungry and less concentrated, I have to go to the fridge or the grocery store and see what’s available. The results are not always guaranteed but in my defense I must say I’ve come out with some good ideas quite a few times.

This may be a brief example of innovation working in our daily life to take us out of trouble, but ¿is there a recipee for innovation? It’s a tricky question to answer this is why maybe people innovating claim to have a lot of fun doing it, but be prepared because as Guy Kawasaky wrote in his book Reality Check “Innovation is a hard, messy process with no shortcuts”. And even though may sound strange how something hard and fun can be ingredients of the same dish, anybody who has been involved in creating a project and stayed long hours working will know how good it feels to do the delivery; maybe that’s why I keep buying books with recipes that I’m not able to follow but still they serve as an inspiration for my own mixes.

Innovation it’s a very popular word nowadays, the first thing that the word brings to me is that something new is involved and one of my favorites concepts it’s the “creative destruction” formulated by Joseph Schumpeter, that following with my cooking analogy is like mix in the blender tomatoes, garlic, onion, chilies, salt and pepper and voilà! a hot sauce is ready to serve.

But can you imagine nowadays cooking without your blender, stove or if your lucky enough to have those fantastic Kitchen Aid mixer that I dream to have one day? this is where technology comes into the picture. Technology is a fortunate combination of two ingredients: systematic knowledge given by science that helps us understand the interactions between space, matter & energy; and engineering that’s coming up with enough creativity to apply objective knowledge to the creation of concepts, designs or prototypes that with a pinch of good luck can become a useful new product.

So the task for tech people doing innovation is to destroy old paradigms in a creative way to come out with something really new. Maybe at this point you realize that I haven’t come out with a recipe for innovation, hopefully I sketch out some ingredients. So now is up to you to decide what ingredients to use, how to mix them, in what quantities and for how long in our daily work but also in our hobbies, meanwhile Bonn Appetite!!!